Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi travels through Rajasthan with American legend, Amy Tan. In a Bazaar exclusive he paints an intimate portrait of one of contemporary literature’s more astute and enduring voices.
IN AN ESSAY ON HIS TRAVELS WITH BRUCE CHATWIN, ACROSS AUSTRALIA, Salman Rushdie said that when you travel with someone you can either hate them fully—or fall in love for life. At the start of our trip through Rajasthan, I remember turning to Amy Tan—spiritual forebear, fellow traveller—as we negotiated a maze of thousands of candles flanking the path to the Penguin Random House party in Jaipur. Her wise, fine face, in candlelit tones, radiated an awareness of life as imperfect and difficult but also essentially fair and terrifyingly beautiful.
We first met 10 years ago in California, and our reunion in India felt auspicious. We seemed to sense this was something to hold on to—a shared awareness of the moment, its breadth and contained mystery, and of us crossing its threshold, which is to say: We were now going to the party. The party, fabulous as it was, left only faint impressions (an agent I’d shouted at; small earthen pots of biryani) but the precise moment before we entered it—a travelling crew of four, including Tan’s dashing husband, Lou DeMattei, and their friend Duncan Clark—carries all the light of our trip, a trick of time wedged between memory and imagination, half remembered, entirely felt.
We were going someplace special, we knew; and we had lived in special hours. What would we remember?
It was her familiar face—corralled perfectly in smart, foxy hair—that I looked on during our session at the Jaipur Literature Festival a few days before, where she told me about the time her mother pressed a meat cleaver against her neck, threatening to kill her, a memory suppressed until its sudden surfacing at a writer’s retreat. “It felt like the end of love,” she said before thousands of her readers. “It could have been the end of life.”
Esta historia es de la edición May 2018 de Harper's Bazaar India.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición May 2018 de Harper's Bazaar India.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Filler Fatigue
With worries about facial distortion and a shift towards the natural, is it time to sav goodbye to these corrective tweaks?
Mind-Skin Connection
Is il possible for your skincare to communicate with your brain:
Tailored for the Game
Fashion meets sports as U.S. Polo Assn. names Sawai Padmanabh Singh of ol Jaipur’ s royal family its global ambassador.
Reimagined Classic
Louis Vuitton launches the Neverfull Inside Out bag, transforming the icon into a fully reversible tote.
Italian Muse
Guecr's new high jew ellery collection isa stroll through the country’s picturesque gardens.
Co Gs Art Post, Gas Art Pas New CELSIOR Net Lay the show Neking ble e dh PATRON An TH Fotal 24 ANAR Romantics
Romcoms might not have prepared me for modern dating, but they offered a timeless sartorial guide to falling in love.
Making a Case for India's Ingenuity
William Dalrymple says The Golden Road is an extraordinary story but also the most challenging book he has written in the last two decades.
On My Playlist
Playback singer turned indie-pop artiste Dhee talks about music, identity, and empowering a new generation.
Explicitly Bold
The latest lipstick range by Nars is designed to empower wearers with colour and confidence.
Art in a Bottle
The Perfume Library founder Jahnvi Lakhota Nandan believes fragrances are meant to be liberated.